


She Came From Nothing

by QueenOfCarrotFlowers



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Childbirth, Crack, F/M, Pregnancy, Reylo Baby, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-14 17:00:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18952261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenOfCarrotFlowers/pseuds/QueenOfCarrotFlowers
Summary: Rey travels across time and space at the moment she gives birth.





	She Came From Nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HarpiaHarpyja](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/gifts).



> There are potential triggers I have not tagged, and the prompt for this story is a spoiler, so I'll put it in the end tags. If you are triggered by pregnancy or childbirth you absolutely should not read this story; if you are triggered by incest you should click to the end and read the prompt and description to see if you should read further. This is crack but also angst? I don't even know. Thanks to HarpiaHarpyja and flypaper_brain for reading it over!
> 
> If you dig this check out my time travel AU, canonverse based on The Time Travelers Wife: _[In Tempore](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1246295)_

"KARK."

It's all Rey can bring herself to say, at the moment she realizes what exactly is going on. _Kark, kark, kark_. One moment she'd been relatively comfortable in a maternity medbay, with soft furniture and a tub full of hot water, her husband sitting in a chair next to where she crouched on the floor, reading from that book, and the next moment she was on the dusty floor of a room - a familiar room, familiar in a general way if not in specifics, a room like her own back on Jakku. There was a gasp and a crash as a woman in the corner dropped the pot she was holding, before she took in the situation and set herself to making Rey comfortable, even though there was no reason at all for her to do so.

"Kark my life. Kark my..." Rey's speech is interrupted by a contraction, stronger and longer than the previous one, and all she can do is breathe through it, as she and Ben had been practicing for the last couple of months.

Ben. She wishes Ben were here with her. At the same time she curses him, because she's certain that her current predicament is directly related to the book he was reading in the medbay, the most recently discovered ancient text - the one that claims to explore the art and science of Force-enabled time travel. The one he's been reading out loud to her, despite not knowing the intricacies of the language or how, exactly, the letters are to be pronounced. Maybe that wasn't such a great idea after all.

Rey begins swearing again as soon as the contraction is finished.

"My dear," the human woman says to her in Basic, as she putters around the small room, adding another log to the fire and pushing the duracrete block back against the door when the wind threatens to push it open again, "please calm down. I know this is unusual - nothing like this has ever happened to me, either - but that baby is ready to come and you need to concentrate on that and not on... whatever else is going on." Don’t think about the fact that the Force is playing the cruelest trick and has apparently sent you back to be a participant, for a second time, in your own birth. Don’t think about that at all, Rey.

The woman is probably right, though, she should save her strength instead of using it to curse her husband, and the Force, so Rey leans back against the pile of textiles and attempts to get comfortable. The woman - Dwalisa Gartgow, Rey knows her although clearly she does not know Rey - had hastily gathered them from the corners of the room when Rey had appeared only a few minutes before, naked as the day she was born and well into labor. Considering the strangeness of the situation Rey is surprised that Dwalisa is handling it so well, but she should give her credit; in Rey's experience she always had been remarkably even-keeled and calm, no matter what. It's part of the reason she'd been able to survive for so long in the hell that was Jakku.

Rey had grown up knowing Dwalisa; from the Outpost, from late nights around the fire, talking and sharing food and telling stories. The woman had always been kind to Rey, small acts of compassion dropped into her life along the years, and Rey had always thought she was quite old. This woman wasn't old, however; she wasn't that much older than Rey herself, although she had clearly already led a hard life. Her skin was leathered from exposure to sun and wind, and she was thin, a thinness that Rey remembers, born of constant scarcity. Rey wishes she had some food to offer her; not only to repay her for her kindness today, but just because.

Another contraction radiates out from her belly and Rey cries out in pain. It occurs to her that she could use the Force to some effect, to ease the pain, and she reaches out to it, brings it to her, and it helps. She also takes the opportunity to reach out for Ben, send out a message through their bond, only there is no bond. Of course there isn't; if Rey is right, and she is sure she's right, at this moment Ben is a ten year old boy on Chandrila, lost and alone despite his family. Rey wishes that she could reach him, but apparently it doesn't work that way.

Rey wonders, for the first time since she arrived in the past, if she is ever going to make it home. She expects that she will, but that her baby won't, and the thought breaks her heart even as it brings her some comfort.

How does time work, anyway? She considers this as Dwalisa gently lifts up the sheet that she'd used to cover Rey's naked body, to take a peek between her legs. If everything that is supposed to happen, happens, what does that mean for Rey? For her baby?

Can she change what has already happened? 

Another contraction, and Dwalisa is encouraging her to push this time. It's a quick birth, and surprisingly easy once the pushing starts. Within minutes the cord has been cut and the baby is wrapped in a blanket and is in her arms, nuzzling at her chest, as Dwalisa works below on cleaning up the afterbirth. 

Rey is already planning a trip back to Jakku to repay Dwalisa for her assistance. Will she remember? Had she already figured it out, as Rey got older? Or had she attributed the similarity between the child and the mother to basic genetics? 

“Dwalisa,” Rey says, and the woman looks up in shock.

“Do you know me?” 

“I do. Or I will.” 

The woman’s face draws together in confusion, and Rey shakes her head and holds her daughter out to her with trembling hands.

“I think I’ll be leaving soon,” she whispers, her throat beginning to burn, “please take her.”

Dwalisa wipes her hands against her skirt and lifts the baby out of Rey’s hands, pulling the bundle against her own chest.

“Where will you go?” 

“I’ll go back,” Rey answers, crossing her arms against her breasts, already sore, as the tears begin to flow, “back to where I came from. She doesn’t come with me. I was wearing a top when I left, and holding my husband’s hand, and he isn’t here, so I don’t think I can take things with me. Besides, she has a life to live here.”

Dwalisa looks down a the soft, pink face of the baby and smiles. “She is beautiful.”

“Find her a home,” Rey says, knowing that she will, and that it will not be a good one. “Watch over her? For me?”

“I will,” she nods.

Rey’s head is starting to swim, her eyesight growing fuzzy. Was this how it felt when she left the first time? Is she leaving? She thinks she is leaving now.

“Tell her,” Rey begins… she wants to say “tell her I love her,” but she can’t. She can’t because she didn’t. No one ever told her that her mother loved her. They always told her something else.

“Tell her she came from nothing,” Rey cries out, before the Force reaches back for her and pulls her to the present, to the comfortable maternity medbay with the soft furniture and her husband, hysterical with worry.

“The baby!” Ben cries, as soon as he’s satisfied that Rey herself is well. “Where’s the baby? Where is our daughter?”

Rey laughs and cries and laughs some more. “She’s with us, Ben. She’s been with us the whole time.”

He looks around, as though a baby might magically appear out of nowhere, or be floating in the air next to his head. 

“She’s with us?”

Rey took a deep breath. “Ben, thanks to you, and that book, I traveled back in time, and to Jakku, and I gave birth to a daughter.”

Ben just stares at her, and she can almost hear the gears of his mind moving, putting the pieces together.

“A daughter,” he says slowly. “Back in time. On Jakku.”

“A daughter who came from nowhere.”

“That baby…” he gazes at her, his eyes full of tears and wonder.

“Was me, yes,” and Rey laughs again. “I am our daughter.” 

Ben embraces her, and he cries for his missing child, the child he holds in his arms. But Rey laughs. She laughs and he cries and finally they cry together. Because what else can they do? Their child is gone, but their child is here, and Rey is her own child, and Ben is her father. 

**Author's Note:**

> So HarpiaHarpyja said "I already regret proposing this but a jokey discussion of Twitter made my brain go here: Kylo is Rey's father, but Rey is also her own mother, via time travel. how??? Idk time travel." So I wrote this.
> 
> It's very crack but technically I should warn for father/daughter incest and also very literal child loss (although the child doesn't die, she just grows up in the past and becomes her own mother).


End file.
